Re: Any advice on remote pairing?

On Tue, Oct 11, 2016 at 7:43 PM, Jeff Langr [email protected]
[extremeprogramming] <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
> I found remote pairing to be considerably more difficult than live
> pairing; there are too many ways to get distracted, and no safeguard of
> someone to smack you when you do. Any latency issues make it frustrating
> for the non-hosting party. Still, I'd rather pair when distributed than not
> pair.
>
>
This is exactly how I feel. I think the advantages of pairing outweigh
anything you could do alone. However, the frustration of dealing with
latency and temporary network issues can limit the amount of useful pairing
time. Timezones and other remote scheduling factors can also add to the
problem.

Additionally, I have found that the best remote pair programmers are those
with real face-to-face pairing experience. It is almost impossible to get
the right feeling out of remote pair programming if you have never
experienced what it feels like in person. So, unless you can seed your team
with people who have that experience… or at least get subsets of the team
physically together to practice on a fairly frequent basis, you are
probably going to get mediocre results. However, this is probably still
better than letting team members spend most of their work day in isolation.